Weekend working at the allotment

On Saturday I had a full and demanding day of meeting friends, celebrating birthdays and visiting the beach. On Sunday I spent the day walking with a friend and then cooking a roast pork lunch.

The net result of my almost total allotment neglect is that I now have a roof on my shed and three (yes three!) compost bins!

Of course it’s because I was out of the way that OH was able to get on with his famed structural stuff – when I’m there he’s constantly distracted by the process of growing things, harvesting things and killing the things that stop our things growing or eat them before we can.

But today I have made up for things. I’ve planted the lemongrass (tutorial in the next post for those who didn’t know you could grow your own!); harvested strawberries; planted out fennel, lavender and some bulbs; inaugurated the first compost bin with most of a spotted laurel, some comfrey ribs and chicken manure; picked out the broad bean tops; weeded the salad bed and taken two bags of rubbish to the tip.

The beans were getting infested with blackfly, so I’ve picked all the infested tops and disposed of them and then checked all the other plants and the ones that have already set beans have had their good tops picked out too, so that the aphids find them less attractive. It’s one of the downsides of not overwintering broad beans that the aphids find the succulent tips so delicious and the ants farm the aphids so that there’s a constant source of aphids being herded to the plants. But at least we have broad beans this year – so many people lost their overwintered ones to snow.